Beautiful Facebook Design

So a lot of people have been yelling about the disastrous changes that the Facebook team implemented in their design. Frankly I don’t see the fuzz, as the changes they did wasn’t that major if you just look at it. Sure – it needs a few minutes to get familiar with, but when you start using it in the way they meant for it to be used, then you quickly see the benefits of these changes. Sure; they most likely did some of these changes to stop the expansion of Twitter; though I do hope for their sake that this wasn’t the main goal. Twitter is a completely different way of interracting with people and for the time being, I don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t have both a Facebook account and a Twitter account.

So what did actually change? They started to focus a bit more on what really matters instead of the countless useless applications/games there is for Facebook. Now the actual updates the users performs comes into focus and with the live-updates that now happens, you get feeling of more direct interraction rather than a semi-live page. Furthermore they added the highlights to the right, now in my personal oppinion this is the only thing that is a bad decission. I couldn’t care less what other groups people joins as I am not there to join countless of groups, but rather to keep in touch with my friends and family. It would have been far nicer if they would add a list of recently added/updated galleries.

I would also love to see more about upcoming events/birthdays; let’s face it – we all have a hard time remembering birthdates and such, thus this is a splendid way to keep up-to-date about what is going on. Why not focusing on these things, things that the user would indeed value and treasure rather than the bloated highlights. Another thing that I am not completely comfortable with is the new placement of “invitations and friend requests”. But as with everything else that was changed, it’s just a matter of getting used to.

Overall, if you look at it from a bit different perspective, the changes they did makes it easier to follow Twitters success, while the placement changes is better in term of advertisement placements. Especially if you take into the consideration on how people places their eyes when they first load up a webpage.

So what do I think? Different, yes – bad? not at all; good? sure – but takes a bit to get used to and it’s not perfect.

Other sources

• VG.no (norwegian) – #2
• ITavisen.no (norwegian) – #2